


No One Needs To Know

by Minako1x2



Series: Tumblr Marvel Prompts [9]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel (Comics), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, Winter Soldier (Comics)
Genre: Angst, Black Widow - Freeform, Brainwashing, Bucky needs a hug, F/M, M/M, Memory Loss, Natasha is the best, Past Bucky Barnes/Steve Rogers, Post-Captain America: The First Avenger, Pre-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Protective Bucky Barnes, Protective Natasha Romanov, Very Minor Original Characters - Freeform, Winter Soldier Bucky Barnes, and he gets one, light mention of violence and torture, more comic compliant than movie
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-13
Updated: 2015-07-13
Packaged: 2018-04-09 02:18:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,902
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4330026
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Minako1x2/pseuds/Minako1x2
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"No one needs to know."</p><p>It starts with a glance.<br/>One glance, different from all the others. No one's ever looked at the Asset like that before. Like he's something more than a weapon, something more than a tool to be used and put away, something maybe . . . human. </p><p>The Asset isn't supposed to have feelings. Neither is the spy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	No One Needs To Know

**Author's Note:**

  * For [shanology](https://archiveofourown.org/users/shanology/gifts).



> A big THANK YOU to Shanology for this one. 
> 
> On my birthday I asked for prompts, and she gifted me with "No one needs to know" for Bucky/Nat.  
> This intrigued me, as I do love me some BuckyNat, and so I sat to think about it. Did I want to go full-on shippy? More brotp? Did I want angst or shenanigans?  
> I ended up with ideas for both. 
> 
> This is the angst.  
> I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. 
> 
> The shenanigans will follow. ^_^

It started with a glance.

Just a glance; quick and meant to only take up a moment of their time, meant to go unseen.

But he saw. And it was the first time anyone had ever looked at him that way.

At least, that he remembered. Currently, his memory only went back as far as two weeks. It was the longest he’d been awake, out of the cold, in a long time. Or so he was told.

Three days later, he caught her glancing at him again.

He’d been ordered to assist in the training of the newest crop of Red Room graduates. They’d been rigorously educated in the delicate and dark world of spy-work, taught to mimic, to charm, to lure, to kill. Now, there would be one last test of their fighting prowess--him.

She was one of three. With fire red hair, and a delicate face that no-doubt belied the deadliness that lay beneath. The other two were good. Fine. They lasted against him, for a time. No one expected them to outsmart him, to win in a contest of strength. The first, the blonde, lasted ten minutes, outrunning him in the compound for a time, then proving herself slippery enough to evade his hands for no more than three minutes. He had her choking on the ground, his metal hand wrapped around her throat when his handlers finally ordered him to release her. He let her up, unmoved by the fear in her eyes. He was used to fear. She was right to fear.

The second, a brunette, lasted a bit longer. She set a trap, tried to lead him around the back, into her web of charged wire. He evaded her clever contraption, sniffed her out where she hid beneath the rubble of an older building that had been taken down, and put an end to her test with a swift hit to the back of the head.

He didn’t know what became of either of them. He didn’t care.

The third, the redhead, she was different. As they carried the second out, she spared another glance, one much like the first. He couldn’t place what it was, what he saw there--he’d never seen it before, and so had no word for it--but it made him uncomfortable. Which was also new.

When it was her turn, when the beginning of her trial was announced, she did not run. Instead, she stood there, tiny and powerful, and dressed like nothing more than a common Russian girl. He waited, studying her, watching, intrigued. Had it been his mission, he would have simply killed her then and there, but it was not. His mission was to test her, so he stared her down, waiting for that ripple of fear to pass through her, to force her hand.

It never came.

He took a step towards her, trying to set her off. She narrowed her green eyes, tilted her chin up, and took yet another breath.

“Run, girl.” His voice was rough, the Russian words scratchy. He didn’t speak much.

She did.

Straight at him.

It was unexpected. Unheard of.

She lasted a respectable amount of time against him, even managing to get herself on his back, a thin wire wrapped around his neck. But he overcame her as he had all the others, as he always did. In the end, she lay dazed at his feet, blood dripping from her lip, and her head lolling side to side. He left her there, his job done.

But he thought he felt the corner of his mouth twitch upwards. She’d surprised him. He liked that.

He didn’t like many things.

It was another two days until he saw her again. He’d just returned from a mission, a simple assassination that bared little mention. A politician, a clean shot. He didn’t ask for names. Or reasons. He was sitting outside--Russian winters didn’t bother him--cleaning his gun because he found the process soothing. Every day his mind seemed busier, louder, filled with things he couldn’t name, couldn’t explain. Not a lot, but there nonetheless. Sometimes, he thought he heard a name, but it was never clear, always as if being spoken underwater. He knew what words sounded like when submerged. He’d drowned a man only the week before.

She walked up to him, unafraid, her red hair blowing in the wind, her body wrapped in a thick winter coat that left only her face exposed.

He was glad she was not dead.

“You’re like me, aren’t you?” she said, her voice light, beautiful.

He said nothing. The act of speaking often hurt, he did it so little. Besides, no one expected him to speak outside of mission reports. Sometimes he wasn’t sure he had many words beyond “complete,” “objective,” or “terminated.”

“We’re here because we have no other choice,” she said, looking down at his hands. They were covered in grease and oil. “But we came from somewhere else,” she continued when he once again said nothing in return. “I came from a small village outside Perm. Where did you come from?”

“The cold.” It was all he knew. And the longer he was awake, the more he longed for the silence of the cold. The sleep he would have within cryo. Sometimes, he dreamed.

But then those dreams were wiped away, until they faded to nothing more than smoke. He knew they’d been there, but nothing more.

Nothing other than they were _warm_.

The girl laughed, and the sound was dark, tainted by her years in the red of this organization, but musical despite it all. “We are Russian, we all come from the cold.”

He had nothing else to offer her.

She watched him a moment longer, making him feel as if she could see past all his armor, his mask, through all of that and down to the very core of him. She couldn’t possibly have seen much there. When the wind changed, she smiled, and walked away.

The next day, the door to his cell opened after the customary triple knock. He sat bolt upright on his cot, alert, aware, and ready for action. Always ready. No new mission was scheduled, but it wasn’t unusual for something to come up. However, he suspected he’d been awake long enough that they would call him down to the chamber soon. The noise in his head was only getting worse, and while his handlers had no way of knowing that, he’d found himself waking with pains in his chest, an unsteady pulse, and moisture in his eyes. Something was wrong with him. Sometimes, he thought he almost . . . remembered something.

The light of the hall illuminated her silhouette, and she had become unmistakable to him. Turning on the lights of his cell, she entered, shutting the door behind herself. Her hair had been pulled back, and her collar had been buttoned all the way up to her throat. Still, her figure was remarkable.

“I’ve been given a new mission,” she said, keeping her distance until he looked at her in question. She seemed to understand that he would not speak if it could be avoided. From her back pocket, she withdrew a pair of scissors, small, but sharp. “For your hair,” she said by way of explanation. He could already feel the tension in his muscles ebbing. “It’s grown too long, and is getting in your eyes.”

He shook the hair away. Thinking back, he had brushed it aside during his mission the day before.

“They seem to be under the impression that because I’m a woman, I’ll do a better job at cutting it than they could. They’re right. I will. Though I doubt my gender has anything to do with it.”

There was a single chair in his cell, though he rarely sat in it. That was usually reserved for whoever had come to brief him on his latest assignment. But she had him sit, and then gently wrapped a towel about his shoulders--to catch the hair. She’d also brought a comb, and he stoically endured the lengthy time it took for her to do away with all the knots that had tangled themselves into his hair over the years.

It was when she could run the comb through his hair without any resistance that she broke the silence. “I’m Natalia.”

Natalia. It was a nice name. A beautiful name. It suited her.

She continued to comb his hair, despite the fact that the action was no longer needed. But it . . . it felt nice.

He thought maybe he remembered someone doing this for him before.

Before what?

“What do I call you?” she asked.

“I am The Asset.”

“That’s what _they_ call you. What do _I_ call you? Did you have a name?”

A name.

Pieces. Just flashes of sound. Nothing made sense. Nothing sounded like anything.

And yet, it all felt just out of reach.

He shook his head suddenly, frustrated by this new inability. It made that pain in his chest return. “I have no name.”

“Hmm.” She seemed to consider this, setting the comb aside, and picking up the scissors. “I’ll think on it then. I’ll need something to call you, but a name should be right, not something chosen at random.”

She cut his hair, shortened it far beyond the usual hack job he was given. Instead of simply trimming it, she cut away the bulk of the mass, until it no longer covered his ears, and was close cut at the nape of his neck. He ran his hand through it after she left. Having no mirror, he couldn’t see what it looked like (had no idea what he looked like really), but as the shortened strands fell from his fingers bit by bit, that ache around his heart returned, and one word came to him. _Familiar._

“There,” she said just before she’d left him. “You know, you’re quite handsome.”

_“How do I look?”_

_“Handsome. As always.”_

He didn’t know those voices, couldn’t see the face. It was a blur, a half-formed dream.

The gears of his arm hummed and whistled as he clenched his fist into his hair.

 

They had him train her. He fought with her, forced her to push herself to her limits. He showed her how to kill a man with her thighs, how to break arms with minimal effort, and how to open a hole in a man that would leave him bleeding out in a matter of seconds. Her skills were admirable, of course they were, he’d expected no less. He went out with her, into the streets, saw firsthand how she could charm a stranger, make friends with a shop woman, smile at children as if there was nothing to fear. She was already deadly. He taught her to be deadlier.

He enjoyed sparring with her. She was clever, intelligent in a way he didn’t feel the others around them were. There was a sparkle to her eyes, a glimmer that spoke of something more. She would pretend for him, show him the roles she could play. He liked it best when she danced.

As far as he knew, they’d always kept him masked. Sometimes even when he slept. They’d never given him permission to take it off, and so he’d never asked.

Natalia took off his mask. She shaved his face, and despite her having a blade to throat, he never felt any sense of threat. And even if she did try to cut his throat--would he care?

He didn’t know.

She never tried. He knew she wouldn’t.

Wiping the shaving cream from his face, she let her fingers trail over his skin, smooth and soft after her ministrations. The first three times, he always watched her, refused to take his gaze from her face. No one looked at him like that. No one but her. The fourth time, he let his eyes close as she touched him.

No one else touched him this way. Gentle. Reverent.

“красивый,” she said, every time. And then she would leave.

This time, with his eyes closed, her word a whisper on the air between them, she remained.

“красивый,” she said. _Handsome._ He was beginning to think that was the name she had chosen for him. He wasn’t sure he deserved it, or even if it was the truth, but he liked it.

He liked her.

She was a liar. A spy. A black widow prowling her web, and they were all but flies, tangled there, awaiting death.

He would welcome death if it came at her hands.

But he knew liars. He knew the signs. He knew how to read a target, how to predict their next move. He’d watched her move about the compound, submissive to those who expected it, strong for those who wanted to see it, and sweet to those who knew no better.

They were all fools, inches from death.

With him, he saw no lies.

The door to his cell was shut; the guards outside no longer insisted on keeping an eye out. After all, it had been months. Three. Sixty three days, to be precise. Neither of them had killed the other yet, and his spider had convinced them all that she could be trusted. No one disturbed them, not while she cut his hair, shaved his face.

She drew her fingers along his jaw as she always did, and he let his eyes drift closed.

Then he felt her slide slowly onto his lap. His eyes shot open, his hands grabbing at her waist, holding her still, preventing her from going any further. She had both feet on the ground, one boot at either side of his own, her hips hovering just above his.

“What are you doing?” They were the first words he’d spoken to her all week, and she smiled.

“Trust me.” It wasn’t a question, wasn’t a demand or an order. He was good at taking orders. This was . . . confusing. Her fingers still traced his jaw, her eyes searching his, her breathing calm, collected.

His breathing, however . . .

“You’re like me,” she said, and he remembered the first time she had ever spoken to him. “We live our lives, we’re good at them. The best. But we hate it. We hate them. They treat us like tools, as weapons. Things to be used and put away, to be oiled so we work to our best advantage, but without thought, without feeling. They try to burn it away, and in some it works, but not us. Not completely. We have enough left to hate them for it.”

He didn’t have a lot of words. Didn’t have enough memories to even scratch the surface of feeling like he was anything more than the asset they called him--but her words sounded right. He hated them. Hate. That was something he had enough memory to piece together.

“Love is dangerous,” she continued. “It makes people weak, makes them make mistakes. But you and me . . . I think we should take it where we find it. Don’t you?” She bent her knees, lowered herself slowly until she sat across his lap. He let her.

“They won’t ever approve.”

“No one needs to know.”

She shifted, rolled against him, and his nerve endings fired off signals that had been long dead, long dormant and unattended to. It lit a fire in him that burned away the cold.

And in his mind, he saw a face.

Her mouth slotted against his, and she tasted like the crisp winter air. Suddenly, he remembered how to do this. How to make her sigh, moan; how to touch her in a way that made her arch against him. He tore the clothes from her body, pressed her back against his hard and uncomfortable cot. He drank in the taste of her, left marks where no one would see. A tiny bruise on her thigh looked familiar, felt familiar, as had the knowledge of how to create it. He pushed inside her, the heat of her welcoming and terrifying all at once. He felt alive. A corpse that hadn’t realized how dead it had truly been until that moment. They both kept silent--that was important--swallowing one another’s sounds in order to keep every detail just between them. And when they were finished, when she finally unwound herself from his arms, leaving a trail of kisses along his chest before dressing and heading for the door, he swore an oath to himself. He would never harm her. Never betray her. He would die before he would let them make a living corpse of her as they had him.

They carried on this way for a month.

All the while, the noise in his head grew worse. Some days, he worried they would begin to notice.

He remembered things. Vague voices. A tiny apartment. A ratty couch, and a single bed. And another person, small and thin. But beautiful and sharp-tongued. Tough as nails. He could never see his face though. Each time the memory came, each time it was a little clearer than the time before, but each time, the boy would turn, and his face would be the first part of the memory to fade away.

His hands could nearly fit around Natalia’s waist, and he remembered thinking the same of this phantom boy. They shared the same fiery spirit, and he clung to that. It was the only part of himself he knew as a constant--his love for these two strong, tiny people.

He loved her. As he’d loved the boy. He’d come to understand that.

What he didn’t understand was how he’d lost it.

Natalia lay with him after another of their clandestine encounters, fingers stroking his side as her lips kissed trails along his neck. He held her close, staring at the ceiling. He had a mission to complete in the morning. He wasn’t worried, but she’d told him that she suspected they would send her away on an assignment soon. He’d just nodded, unable to think about anything other than his fear of losing her. Losing this.

Without her, he’d be dead again.

“I’ve finally reached a decision,” she said, still nuzzling the side of his throat.

“What decision?” He spoke to her more often now. The words didn’t hurt as much anymore.

“What I’m going to call you.”

He went still. Held his breath. A name. A name from _her_. The life she sparked in him seemed to quiver, awaiting this moment, this baptism that would make him human once again.

“I’ve been doing some research. Some digging. And I think I’ve come across the perfect name.” She brushed her lips against his ear. “James.”

_“James Barnes, get back here this instant!”_

_“Oh, Jamie boy, not again.”_

_“Sergeant James Barnes, the 107 th.”_

And there was the boy, his face clear, angular and thin, bruised from a fight, but grinning. His lips moved, shaping a word that couldn’t be heard.

“James,” he said, trying it out. He liked the way it felt on his tongue, and yet . . . it wasn’t quite right.

Natalia pushed herself up, kissed his lips, and stroked his face, coaxing his eyes to close. “Don’t think so hard. Let it come in its own time.”

“Steve.” He didn’t even know where the word--the name--came from, but it felt easy and natural.

“Who’s Steve?”

The ache in his chest got worse. His head began to pound, and all the flashes and glimpses that had been plaguing him for the past weeks played over one another all at once. He tried to catch even a single one, but his grasps came up empty. His cheeks were wet. “I don’t know.”

She kissed him, held him, until he fell asleep.

The next morning when his door opened, it was a contingent of guards standing in the light of the hall, not Natalia.

He went with them, obedient as always, his thoughts raging through the memories that had slipped into clarity as he dreamed. He’d had a life, a name, a past. Before all this. Before--

Before what?

So distracted was he, that he didn’t realize where they had led him until it was too late. Not the briefing room, but another, one he hadn’t seen in months.

The chair sat at the center, the cryo chamber in the far corner.

He didn’t know how to fight them. It had been too long. “I have an assignment,” he said, the only rebellion he could think of.

“Which you’ll carry out, after we make a few modifications.” The lead scientist (he’d never cared to learn his name) gestured to the chair.

He sat. James sat. He wanted to think of himself that way now. James sat, and the techs immediately began working on his arm. Their tinkering sent electric jolts up his shoulder, down his spine, but he was used to that. He’d felt much worse. It made his whole body jerk, but they’d strapped him down, so there was no danger.

Finally they were done, and the techs moved off.

James remained restrained.

“I want you to know something.” A new voice came, a familiar voice. His _master_. His name didn’t matter. The man was older, grey and beginning to wrinkle, but the mere sight of him evoked the unavoidable impulse to obey in James. There was no say here. He had no say.

But . . . he had a past. And now . . .

“I want you to know,” his master repeated, “that you almost succeeded. You almost got away with it.”

What was he talking about?

“But she was sloppy. A mistake that won’t be forgotten, and won’t be taken lightly. She never should have touched that file. Your file.”

He flexed against his restraints. Nothing budged. They wouldn’t. They’d been designed specifically for him. To contain him.

“And as for you, well . . . We left you out too long as it is. But no matter now. You’ll never remember, and she’ll never remember. And to ensure that, you’ll also never see her again. Not that you’ll even know the difference.”

“Excuse me?”

He’d said that aloud. “No.” He said it again. Flexed again. Kicked. He had to save her, save Natalia, at the very least.

His master stared a moment, in disbelief, no doubt--then laughed. “Wipe him,” he said, walking away. As if James were nothing.

He struggled, tried to bite the hands that shoved the mouth guard between his teeth, twisted his head from side to side until finally they were forced to strap him down there as well. He held onto the few memories he’d recovered, the memories he’d made, as the machine moved, surrounding him, its components already prickling the air.

He called up the face of the boy, of Steve, who he wanted to remember so badly. Whose name felt like home on his lips.

He clung to the feel of Natalia’s body, soft and strong. Her touch, gentle and caring despite what he was, what he did. Her replayed her voice in his mind, whispering endearments, gasping her pleasure, calling him красивый, _handsome_ , speaking his name last night for the first time.

He heard the switch flip, and fire erupted all through his head.

He screamed, holding onto the memory of two faces.

And then he couldn’t remember what he’d been trying to remember anymore.

**Author's Note:**

> I'll go write the shenanigans now . . . 
> 
> Come say hi on Tumblr! Or...ya know...scold me for the angst. Either one.  
> [minako1x2](http://www.minako1x2.tumblr.com)
> 
>  
> 
> Side note: I used the internet for the single word of Russian, as I don't remember much from my brief study in college. If I'm incorrect, you have my apologies, and please let me know. I'll fix it. ^_^


End file.
